In my eternal quest to max out the possible combinations of colour and patterns using as few materials as possible I started playing around with the texture/material settings to find out that you can have two or more textures overlapping each other on a single face.
I have one UV map showing a 256 colour palette and one transparent map with 36 assorted patterns, trying to have them both set to ‘UV’ (as opposed to ‘generated’ etc.) and unwrap them independently from one another. So far – no luck but would such a thing be possible in principle?
Then I would just unwrap the colour map to the desired colour and the pattern map to the desired pattern, creating an insane amount of possible iterations with a single material.
Right now I’m going with one pattern map and a number of procedural blender materials – it’s nothing short of a quantum leap from my previous system but obviously it would be great if I can make it a little more streamlined still.
An object can have up to 8 separate UV maps
A material can consist of up to 18 different texture slots
Each textures can use any of the available UV maps
A material can also formed from a combination of multiple materials
To give a specific answer show examples of what you want so it’s much clearer than having to understand what you have written.
The one that can be seen in the 3D view is a small portion of the pattern map. Then there’s the colour map (as seen in the uv-window). The problem is that I need them both to be UV-mapped to have control over which part of them is visible, but when they are I can’t unwrap them independently of one another.
Here’s what happens when I scale up the colour map to home in on a particular colour field – the pattern scales up along with it (black artefacts on the plane in 3D-view is the tiled pattern map).
Note how the noisy area in the uv-windwo indicates the amount to which the pattern map is scaled up, even though it shows me the colour map. The intention here was to scale up the colour map to unwrap to one of the colour fields and have the pattern map stay the same size as in the previous image.
